Real estate executive Preston Butcher and his wife, Carolyn Butcher, have donated $1.5 million to the ULI Foundation to create the ULI Homeless to Housed Initiative to identify and disseminate best practices that enable communities to provide housing for people experiencing homelessness.

Five ULI District Councils across the United States have been selected to participate in a new program focused on advancing action on equity in parks and open space over a 12-month period. Through the District Council Cohort for Park Equity, local teams will engage in two-day Technical Assistance Panels that consider specific questions related to park equity and access in their communities. The program is supported by The JPB Foundation.

Amazon has announced plans to provide more than $124.4 million to build 1,060 affordable homes near four public transit sites while working in partnership with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and Sound Transit to complete the developments. This is part of Amazon’s $300 million transit commitment from 2021 to create 3,000 new affordable homes in collaboration with the transit agencies in each region.

Since 2019, Toronto’s Housing Now initiative has activated city-owned sites for the development of affordable housing within mixed-income, mixed-use, and transit-oriented communities.

The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation of Philadelphia can create a new neighborhood along the southern reach of the Central Delaware River by leveraging the reuse of old industrial piers as resilient, ecological infrastructure in order to anticipate the risks associated with sea-level rise, according to a new report released by ULI.

ULI MEMBER–ONLY CONTENT: How can urban cores rebound from the pandemic? Members of ULI’s Urban Revitalization councils discuss the pandemic’s potential long-term effects on development in urban cores, opportunities for creative redevelopment, steps that municipalities can take, ways to enhance resilience in urban cores, and other trends.

As the new appointees at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development settle into their roles, they face challenges both old and new. Ethan Handelman, the new deputy assistant secretary of the agency’s Office of Multifamily Housing Programs, addressed the 2021 ULI Housing Opportunity Conference in March.

ULI has been working in collaboration with a select group of corporate members to produce a “roadmap” for social value measurement that identifies the obstacles, gaps, frameworks, and tools that are available to set targets, manage and measure social impact, and examine best practices already applied from across the real estate industry.

ULI Europe has officially launched ULI Denmark, its 15th national council. Jesper Bo Hansen, head of corporate finance at Catella, will be the chair, serving a two-year term on a voluntary basis, and will be joined by an executive committee of local industry leaders.

At the 2020 ULI Asia Pacific Leadership Convivium, an international retail CEO shared her experience of engaging with customers, both offline and online, during the COVID-19 pandemic and how working with understanding landlords has helped create win/win outcomes.